This $31.1 billion, which enters the country as an economic benefit for the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, will be distributed as designated in the SGR, and of this amount, $10.1 billion will be allocated to the country’s departments and regions for the approval of high regional impact projects; $3.4 billion will finance projects in science, technology and innovation; $3.4 billion will finance projects to stabilize and transform the territories most affected by violence, poverty, illicit economies and institutional weakness. (see budget distribution).

According to Mapa Inversiones, so far in 2023, 3,827 SGR projects have been approved, with an investment of $5 trillion, of which $284 billion have already been executed, in different sectors such as: agriculture, culture, transportation, science, technology and innovation, among others.

To better monitor these projects, organizations such as Transparencia por Colombia have mapped, promoted and provided different tools to promote higher levels of transparency and access to information in the extractive sector. Among these tools are
INFOBPIN
a technological platform where you can track the identification number of royalty investment projects (BPIN) ( See more tools here).

In addition, the country has been able to make progress in different areas such as social investment or even the construction of tertiary roads, with the use of royalties. Colombia has known initiatives that stand out for the good use and management of these resources, such as the interconnection of ancestral roads by the U’wa community in Boyacá or at the University of Caldas, with a project on biotechnology for waste utilization.

In this regard, the National Planning Department (DNP) and the Universidad del Rosario have an initiative that measures the best projects in the country and the best entities, respectively, within these six categories stand out as: Closing Gaps, Innovation and Orange Economy, Sustainable Income Generation, Environmental Sustainability, Regional Integration and Health Emergency Mitigation. All with a positive impact on the regions.

Another face

Despite the positive impact of the General Royalties System in the regions, corruption has also permeated these monies that belong to Colombians.

For example, the Office of the Comptroller General of the Republic found losses in the resources of the General Royalties System in the Department of Magdalena for $26,520 million due to lack of planning, as well as non-compliance in auditing activities and undelivered works, in an audit carried out in 2021, according to information published on the entity’s web page.

In addition to this, this same entity also found that between 2012 and 2017, about $840,000 million of fiscal incidence in royalty resources were reported, i.e. “works at risk of generating losses for this figure”.

And these scandals have also reached the national media, such as one that came to light in June of last year related to the OCAD Paz. Blu Radio denounced serious irregularities that would have been related to the allocation of these resources and where it is estimated, according to the media, that $500 billion were lost in bribe payments. Among those involved are, paradoxically, officials of the Comptroller’s Office, as well as officials of the DNP and different contractors and congressmen.

Camilo Vallejo, coordinator of the Transparency Observatory of the University of Manizales, assures that the loss of this public money is serious, and even worse, that entities such as the Comptroller’s Office sometimes fall short in their function. He also assures that as long as there is no sanction against the corrupt, there will be no significant progress.

It also warns about how entities that manage these resources do not comply with disclosing quality information or uploading it completely to the different platforms for citizen control. “We have found royalty projects that appeared blank. The government has many strategies, but does not comply with them, they believe that transparency is not relevant,” he comments.

Although, as Camilo mentions, there are information disclosure strategies on investments with royalty resources, for him, these fall short and he assures that beyond the strategies, there must be a commitment of the entities with transparency, and explains that public information must go beyond telling who was assigned the contract, and tell citizens the public information of these projects.

The deficiency in information, the limitations for citizen control of the resources destined to some projects, says Camilo, limits the role of citizens, who, although they are aware of these resources, encounter barriers when they want to access information and consult it in a transparent manner.

The Civil Society Roundtable for Transparency in the Extractive Industries works on the follow-up and strengthening of transparency mechanisms in the General Royalties System – SGR, seeking to ensure that the objectives of transparency, oversight and access to public information are maintained at the highest level, as well as the effective participation of citizens in the approval and follow-up process of projects financed with royalty resources.

For more information write to: secretariatecnica@transparenciacolombia.org.co

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Different types of mining converge on the mining map in Colombia, such as those that are governed by a legal framework, as in the case of mining. formal o legal which meets the different requirements of Colombian law for the exploitation of natural resources and generally occurs on a large scale; and artisanal o ancestralThe activity carried out traditionally and using little technology and machinery, on a small scale.

On the other hand, there is mining that is not legal, also known as informal or illegal mining.The mining that is carried out without a duly registered mining title, but without the involvement of illegal actors, as well as mining that has illegal armed actors behind it and that is related to other crimes such as drug trafficking or money laundering. However, the State, organizations and other actors generally do not differentiate between informal mining and mining promoted by criminal groups.

According to a 2022 report by the Comptroller General’s Office, illegal mining is destroying Colombia’s rivers, and about 85 percent of the gold exported by the country is the product of this activity.

Transparencia por Colombia explains on its website: “Illegal mining is one of the main causes of deforestation and environmental contamination in Colombia. To start illegal mining operations it is necessary to raze large areas of forest, leaving much of the biodiversity without habitat”.

Other forms of mining affected by criminality

The environment is not the only one affected by this activity, which is mainly focused on gold mining, although other metals such as platinum and silver are also mined.

Esteban Martínez, of the Colombian Mining Dialogue Group (GDIAM), assures that, in the midst of the struggle to put an end to this type of activity, artisanal, formal and informal miners have been stigmatized by society, the public forces and the media, in addition to being extorted and abused by the criminal groups and structures behind illegal mining.

Clear legislation

Martínez stresses that in order to put an end to mining promoted by criminal groups, there must first be legal clarity: “The big problem starts because in Colombia there is no differentiated regulation, we must distinguish the actors and the different types of mining, so as not to confuse legal, artisanal, informal miners with criminals,” he mentions, and adds that the first step to start winning that fight against mining promoted by illegal groups, beyond detonating yellow machinery, is to have clear rules and protect the other types of miners; in addition to a strong presence of all state actors, not only army or police, also educational offerings, productive alternatives, among others.

In addition to this proposal, Isabel Blandón Jaramillo, executive director of Fundación Atabaque, believes that another challenge to reduce or counteract this type of mining is the correct implementation of the Peace Agreements, which would also include a high institutional presence of the State, and where economic reincorporation is involved in regions where mining activities are the economic base, taking into account that in most of these areas there is a high presence of illicit crops, such as coca.

Departments such as Antioquia, Chocó, Bolívar, Córdoba and Amazonas are the main ones affected by mining financed by criminal groups, specifically gold mining, according to the report. Alluvial gold mining. Evidence from remote sensing 2020′. presented by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and supported by the U.S. Embassy in Colombia and the Ministry of Mines and Energy. This report also mentions that 69 % of the mining activity detected is illegal.

Guarantees and transparency

*Humberto Salazar has worked in informal mining for more than 30 years, in departments such as Antioquia and Risaralda, he comments that he learned to live with illegal groups in order to work, but mentions the effects it has had on his work:

“Sometimes you have to risk your life living with these groups, because they don’t care about anything, they come to a river or a piece of land and destroy everything, without a care in the world. There are rapes, extortions and murders in between,” he says.

It demands guarantees from the government. Humberto explains that he and other miners do not dare to denounce because “the government promises but does not deliver” and to make a complaint in a territory dominated by illegal groups that infiltrate society is “to have death assured”, he explains.

State presence and joint work

Non-governmental organizations such as the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) believe that a greater and better presence of the State, including a quality institutional offer in areas where mining by illegal groups is advancing, would help to combat it. There must be incentives from the State for miners to formalize: “In some cases the armed groups themselves are the ones who limit the participation of citizens, miners and mining companies in dialogue scenarios where initiatives can emerge to combat the phenomenon and, in general, to seek solutions to the challenges of their territory,” explains Jose Luis Gil, ARM’s governance officer.

It also discusses the role that extractive industries should play in contributing to these struggles. “In many territories the extractive industries coexist with artisanal and informal miners, in this case, the will of the companies and the State is essential, because they could help train them, support them in their formalization process, this is a way to bring these people closer to legality and control so that they do not fall into criminal mining.”

Isabel Blandón highlights the importance of a coordinated work at different levels, from local to national, as well as a mining planning that is equitable among the different social, economic, political and environmental sectors. “Mining management should be thought not only from the cycle of extractive projects to give line to the legal and regulatory, but from the social, cultural and environmental dynamics of the territories and regions where extractive activities occur in their various scales, thus, the state presence should be thought from a mining management that bets on a mining governance focused on human rights perspective, biological, cultural and obviously an approach based on conflicts, “he says.

Lost track

According to experts, one of the factors favoring armed actors sponsoring gold mining is that this precious metal can be easily traded and transported around the world and there is no traceability, i.e. the trail is lost when it is sold. In this way, illegal groups take advantage of this opportunity to launder money and finance criminal activities.

One of the problems in tracing gold, explains Isabel Blandón, is that in Colombia this issue has mainly focused on documentary traceability, and not on a broader one that involves processes of analysis, monitoring of land risks, among others, in order to reduce the room for maneuver of actors behind the mining promoted by criminal gangs.

Despite the efforts made by the State, illegal mining is advancing and in turn devouring the environment, the Comptroller’s Office calls this phenomenon: “environmental massacre”.

Proposals

Civil society organizations working on behalf of artisanal and informal miners have come up with participation initiatives to support this struggle and proposals such as providing and training the population in monitoring methods that provide technical inputs to demand State action, quantifying and having a secure information system to monitor informal mining and extractive activities financed by criminality, training the security forces so that in their interventions they know how to differentiate the different types of miners, having a large mining company in Colombia, as contemplated in the National Development Plan, that serves to formalize the mining sector in Colombia, and having a large mining company in Colombia, as contemplated in the National Development Plan, that serves to formalize the mining sector, to train the security forces so that in their interventions they know how to differentiate between the different types of miners, to have a large mining company in Colombia, as contemplated in the National Development Plan, which will serve to formalize the artisanal sector, to have a trace of the gold that leaves Colombia to the world, among other benefits.

Transparency and citizen participation, which the Mesa de la Sociedad Civil para la Transparencia en las Industrias Extractivas is working for, are key factors in addressing social and environmental challenges such as crime-sponsored mining and illegal mining. When the different stakeholders – miners, civil society organizations and government – work together they can establish a solid foundation for responsible and sustainable decision making.

For more information, please write to: secretariatecnica@transparenciacolombia.org.co

*Name has been changed at the request of the source to protect his identity.

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For Mariela Cardona, cooking with firewood and gasoline is just a memory in the farm where she lived her youth in a village of Aguadas, Caldas. The transition from cooking with wood to cooking with gas was slow, but by the late 1990s it had been achieved. He did so because he listened to his neighbors and city officials talk about the advantages this change would bring to human health and the environment.

As in the case of Mariela, the energy transition aims to reduce the consumption of coal, oil and gas as the main source of energy, in order to advance in the implementation of clean and renewable energies, environmentally friendly, such as hydroelectric, wind, solar, biomass, among others. This transition has the same objective that was pursued at the time of stopping cooking with wood or gasoline: to take care of people’s health and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.

The world is betting on change

Countries such as Norway, Iceland and Denmark are among those leading this change in Europe, according to the Fostering Effective Energy Transition report , 2021 edition.

In Latin America, the initiative is also opening up ground with countries such as Uruguay, which between 2017 and 2021 generated 94% of electricity through renewable sources, according to information from that country’s Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining. In recent years, Colombia has been following these steps and is working on actions to strengthen the energy transition at the regional level. For example, the current government, headed by President Gustavo Petro, released the text of the National Development Plan 2023-2026, Colombia World Power of Lifewhich has 5 major goals, one of which is the Productive Transformation, Internationalization and Climate ActionThe proposal is to promote the energy transition based on the “diversification of productive activities that take advantage of natural capital and deepen the use of clean energy, that are intensive in knowledge and innovation, that respect and guarantee human rights, and that contribute to building resilience to climate shocks.”.

In addition, the country’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 51% by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, according to the Carbon Neutral Colombia Strategy (ECCN) under the leadership of the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.

People first

According to Juliana Peña Niño, from the Natural Resource Governance Institute
^[1]
1], for the energy transition to be successful, it must be focused on citizens. “Transitions are changes that are planned and are hand in hand with the participation of communities and key stakeholders,” she says.

He assures that these dialogues should have a differential approach according to the regions, in order to address the economic, political, social and environmental needs of each territory. “Legitimacy and dialogue is different in a region like La Guajira, Cesar or the Colombian Amazon. It is to understand that there are differential production chains“.

Juliana is also emphatic in mentioning that governments and companies as part of the energy transition must generate regional intervention mechanisms, participation methodologies, and the publication of information in different formats and languages that are easy to access and understand, so that citizens understand the consequences and needs of the transition: “We are convinced that the energy transition will have a positive impact on our society.We must go beyond just making the information public, we must explain it, make sure it is understood, in order to reduce asymmetries with the citizens, to guarantee the success of the transition“.

Increased citizen participation

Although the Political Constitution of Colombia and different laws such as the Statutory Law on Citizen Participation, Law 1712 of 2014 on Transparency, offer legal guarantees for citizen participation and cooperation mechanisms for civil society organizations, for some experts these tools fall short and sometimes, in practice, there are no guarantees for their due compliance.

Óscar Iván Galvis Mora, from the Colombian Strategy for Adapted and Resilient Low Carbon Development, assures that the information that exists is not in a clear and simple language for an ordinary citizen to understand and take action.

“You can find documents on energy transition, but some are still very technical, which creates a constraint on access to information.“He also explains the importance of dialoguing with communities and making information available to all, including digital platforms, but also methodologies for people who do not have access to them. He even proposes going beyond the Spanish language, recalling that there are different indigenous communities that do not have access to this information in their own languages.

Both experts highlight the importance of the articulation of different citizens’ organizations such as NGOs, foundations, grassroots communities and other civil society organizations so that their voices are heard and taken into account in the formulation of public policies. An example of this is the Civil Society Roundtable for Transparency in the Extractive Industries, which promotes access to information and citizen participation in issues related to the energy transition based on the contributions of the more than 20 organizations that comprise it.

In response to the questions posed for this report, Mariela Cardona, who switched from firewood to natural gas, opens Google, presses voice search and asks: “Energy transition in Colombia”, the search engine returns several results that shed some light, but he wonders why most of the information that appears comes from the media, the national government and very little from the Extractive Industries? Evidencing that the work must continue along these lines.

For more information, please write to: secretariatecnica@transparenciacolombia.org.co

[1] Organización miembro de la Mesa de la Sociedad Civil para la Transparencia en las Industrias Extractivas.

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The Mesa welcomed its selection by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as an organization that contributes to the region’s development.

The Mesa de la Sociedad Civil para la Transparencia en las Industrias Extractivas brings together more than 26 organizations at the national level, with the vision of generating a consolidated and strong civil society movement with a high degree of influence in the public and private sector related to the Extractive Industries in Colombia. With this, it seeks to fulfill its mission to achieve higher levels of transparency, citizen participation, accountability processes and access to public information in the Colombian extractive sector.

For its work, the Mesa has been included in the IDB’s WiConnect platform, which seeks to provide access to grant information, call for proposals, frontier information on the sector, as well as to support the organization by making it visible to donors, other specialists and organizations working in Latin America and the Caribbean. This recognition encourages us to continue working towards transparency and strengthening the participation of civil society from our strategic lines on issues related to EITI, royalties and access to information on environmental issues.

Link on WiCoonect: https://bit.ly/3KDtdyU

For more information, please write to: secretariatecnica@transparenciacolombia.org.co

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The Civil Society Roundtable for Transparency in Industries Extractive presents to the general public the Civic Space in Colombia Report (2019-2022) presented in the framework of the EITI 2022 validation, which concludes that difficulties, risks, restrictions and alarms persist in the generation of an enabling environment for the effective participation of citizens in the governance of their natural resources, and shows how socio-environmental conflicts and violence in the context in which extractive industries operate generate fear and resistance on the part of civil society to exercise control, dialogue and use information from EITI reports in public decision-making processes. It also presents the document of EITI Colombia’s assessments and recommendations to EITI Colombia on 6 priority issues for civil societywith the The purpose of addressing the demands, needs and opportunities for improvement in the implementation of the standard in the country, so that these can be reflected in the National Action Plan (NAP) in the next term of the EITI Colombia process.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (
EITI
) is a global standard that promotes open and accountable management of oil, gas and mineral resources, and seeks to strengthen the governance of natural resources in the Colombian extractive sector. In our country, through a tripartite dialogue table, EITI Colombia seeks to consolidate relations and generate quality information by means of an articulated work between private companies, government and civil society. To this end, reports and some thematic studies on the management of emerging resources in the value chain of this industry are published annually, based on 7 requirements:

In 2022, the second EITI validation process began in Colombia. This process is a mechanism in which the country is assessed on its ability to comply with the provisions of the EITI Standard and the quality assurance of the information reported. Following the guidelines established by EITI at the international level for this purpose, the Civil Society Roundtable for Transparency in the Extractive Industries developed two key inputs to support its positions and the situation that citizens have historically faced in terms of access to information, participation and the search for transparency in the extractive industry.

The first document emerged from the work of the Mesa’s EITI subcommittee, in which 6 priority themes were selected based on the experiences of different civil society organizations at the national level. Based on them, research work was initiated to diagnose and evaluate key aspects, their progress and opportunities for improvement. Thus, in each of these items, a series of recommendations were formulated to address the gaps identified and strengthen the implementation of EITI in Colombia. Several of these recommendations were related to issues such as: disaggregation of data, institutional articulation, improvement of CTN governance mechanisms, use of clear language, implementation of a differential approach, development of training and advocacy strategies, adaptation to citizens’ demands for information, importance of a socio-environmental context and, especially, the inclusion of priority issues for civil society in the preparation of the next NAP.

The second is a detailed report on the status of Civic Space in Colombia, during the period 2019-2022, which was developed with the support and funding from

Publish What You Pay

-a global civil society network of which the Mesa is a member. This report is of great importance for the validation process, as it evaluates each component of the EITI Civil Society Protocol.
EITI Protocol for Civil Society
(expression, operation, association, participation, access to public decision making, available documentation) in Colombia. This document gathers interventions from Mesa organizations, external social organizations, grassroots communities, academia and experts. In this paper, the importance of placing greater emphasis on understanding the context experienced by communities and social leaders living in areas of influence of extractive operations is exposed, since, in practice, risks, fears and warnings are evident for their effective participation in decision-making scenarios, despite the existence of legal frameworks that provide that there must be legal guarantees in these scenarios. Since there are no spaces for debate, there is no use of the EITI information, therefore, recommendations are made, among others, to include the socio-environmental context, ensure the implementation of the Protocol for Civil Society, elaborate a protection strategy for social leaders, encourage the participation of ethnic communities and civil society organizations that are not members of the Mesa.

The Working Group invites you to read and use the information contained in these documents to reflect on the role of the EITI in the protection and promotion of citizen participation, the challenges of strategies for access and use of information, and the generation of spaces for dialogue and informed debate and its impact on the country.

About the Table

In the Civil Society Roundtable for Transparency in the Extractive Industries we promote citizen participation and access to information, with a platform of more than twenty social organizations and academic institutions from different regions of the country, which jointly carry out research, advocacy and citizen control activities regarding transparency in the extractive sector.

• Analysis of the civic space in Colombia within the framework of the EITI 2022 Validation process.
• Assessment and recommendations of priority issues for civil society EITI Validation 2022.

For more information, please write to: secretariatecnica@transparenciacolombia.org.co

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